The Cotopaxi plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Mostly cloudy
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Cotopaxi’s center stands about 6,390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,330 ft to 8,440 ft, a difference of 2,110 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Electric Peak, about 13,550 ft, 13 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic rocks of 1700-m.y. age group (granite), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Volcanic. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mafic-hypabyssal, felsic-hypabyssal. Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 smaller units along the line are not listed.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Cotopaxi reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,930 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
1,040 miles of the trip are on the Arkansas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cotopaxi; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
